Friday, September 12, 2014

Maybe you are an Android user and wondered how sometimes the browser logs you in without asking for a password?

Well, I wondered but never found the time to investigate.

Thanks to the awesome W3C Web Cryptography Next Steps Workshop and thanks to the usual jet-lag I found that time now.
First I thought that this is Google-ism "Chrome does some questionable proprietary trick and knows just how to login to Google accounts". That is half-true.

There is chatter on the chromium list but I seems that the Android browser knows this trick since 2011 and Chrome for Android was released in 2012.

I think this is a good idea. If your company has an mobile app then build that Account Authenticator. This is even more true if your company has several mobile apps. (Put the authenticator in your own CompanyServices.apk (like Google does with the GooglePlayServices) so you can update independently from your apps.)

You might know that I work for a 100% subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom. Why isn't DT doing this? Don't ask me. I am telling them for years that our own AccountAuthenticator would be "gold". But who listens to me. Working for a big company has its challenges.

Back to wondering... How can we get this or something similar standardized through W3C?

Maybe I should write a blog post to make it more known. But then who reads this blog anyway. ;-)

My impression in 2011 was that the common ground was not very broad so the group decided to launch the W3C WebCrypto working group because all agreed that crypto is a precondition to web identity.
Now, three years later I do not see much progress in web crypto or web identity (for that matter).

In the meantime the FIDO alliance was established which has HW-based authentication but a license model that requires that implementers are a FIDO alliance member. That is the opposite of a web standard.

So I think that the WebCrypto WG will not give us "identity for the web". Signing/verification/encryption/decryption are too low level and too easy to use wrong. This is not the way to web identity.